Peter May - Freeze Frames

“Like people pass their time anywhere. At home or at work. As you do. You might live in Paris, but you hardly ever set foot over the door.”

She turned a cold look toward him. “Meaning?”

“Meaning you hardly ever set foot over your door. You live, work, eat, sleep, all in the same place. You might as well live on the moon for all the difference it would make.”

“Except that moon people are notoriously well-balanced and hardly ever need a therapist.”

Enzo grinned. This was more like the old Charlotte. “That’s true. I suppose you need to live in a place like Paris to keep your practice supplied with paranoids and psychotics.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are quite a few in a place like this as well.”

“Yes, but probably not enough to keep you in business.”

At the end of a long, straight stretch, the road dipped down toward the beach at Port Melite, and Enzo drew his Jeep in under the trees. Charlotte got out and walked past the stone benches to look down over the crescent of sand. The breeze from the sea blew her hair back from her face, and Enzo saw her fine, sculpted cheekbones, the line of her jaw, the slightly quizzical upturn of her lips. And he remembered why he had first found her so attractive. “It’s a beautiful spot.” She turned and looked toward the white Killian cottage with its blue shutters. “Is that it?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“Then I suppose it would be only polite to introduce me to Madame Killian before you go dragging me off to your bedroom.”

Jane opened the front door and held it open for them to enter. There was a stiff, oddly formal quality in her demeanour, her smile a little too fixed, slightly strained. “Come in. Have a seat. Can I get you tea? Coffee?”

“No, thank you.” Charlotte sat in the armchair that Jane had waved her to, crossed her legs and leaned back as if she were visiting an old friend.

Enzo could see Charlotte’s look of assessment as she ran her eyes over the Englishwoman. Jane’s look of appraisal in the gaze that met it was very similar. Two females of the species, each sizing up the competition the other might offer for the only available male. “Charlotte’s a psychologist in Paris,” he said, hoping to deflect them from the ritual. “She has her own practice. And actually trained as a forensic psychologist in the States. So the Paris police sometimes ask for her help.”

“Only as a last resort,” Charlotte said. “God forbid the chauvinist French police establishment should have to come to a woman for assistance.”

Jane’s smile immediately warmed a little, as if she and Charlotte had somehow connected, found a common cause against a mutual enemy. Men. Enzo shifted uncomfortably. He stood up. “Anyway, I promised to show Charlotte Adam’s study. If that’s alright. She has a good eye.”

“Of course.” Jane stood up and held her hand out to shake Charlotte’s. “It was nice to meet you. If you need anything over there, just let me know.”

“Thank you, I will.” And as Charlotte and Enzo walked across the lawn through lengthening shadows she said, “She’s an attractive woman.”

“Yes.”

“I suppose you have dinner together every evening.”

“Actually only twice.”

As they reached the door of the annex, a black cat appeared from the side of the building, strutting past Enzo, tail raised, to rub itself against Charlotte’s legs. It meowed softly, and a deep rumbling purr started up in its throat. “Awwww.” Charlotte stooped to stroke it, and it arched its back, pressing up against her hand as she ran it back to the tail. “What’s his name?”

“I have no idea.” Enzo glared at it, and remembered the sensation of needles in his scalp as the cat landed on his head from the top of the study door. And then, again, the scare it had given him, watching from the shadow of the trees as he returned home two nights before.

“Is it Jane’s?”

“I don’t know whose it is.”

Charlotte looked up, detecting his tone. “I didn’t know you had anything against cats. You like Zeke well enough, don’t you?”

“Zeke’s not like other cats,” he said, and meant it. Charlotte’s cat was more like an alien, with cropped cream fur on a skinny body, and saucer eyes in an over-large head. “This one’s been haunting me. Prowling around the place at all hours. Even managed to get inside once, I don’t know how.”

She laughed and stood up. “Maybe it’s the ghost of Adam Killian.”

But he didn’t return her laugh. Almost exactly the same thought had passed through his own mind during those darkly unreal small hours of the morning. Not a serious thought, of course. But the same one to which Charlotte had just given voice. He felt a slight shiver run through him, and wondered if it were just the cold.

He was careful not to let the cat slip in unnoticed this time, holding it at bay with his foot until he had closed the door. He turned on the lights and pushed open the door to Killian’s study. Charlotte walked in and stood in the centre of the floor. Her eyes were everywhere, running along the shelves of books, casting their gaze across his desk, the blood stain on the floor. “Oh my,” she said. “You can feel him.”

Enzo nodded. “You can.”

“Such a sense of the man in this room.” She turned toward Enzo. “Undisturbed for nearly twenty years?”

“Yes.”

“It’s like he’s still alive. Every facet of him is here. The room is like the embodiment of his spirit. A place where it still resides, still lives.” She turned, bright-eyed, toward him. “Oh, Enzo, he’s talking to us. Telling us about himself. All we have to do is know how to listen. Show me the notes.”

So he took her on a tour of the cryptic messages left by Killian for his son. The message list and post-it on the fridge. The entry in the desk diary, the Post-it stuck to the desk lamp. The upside down poem on the wall. She shook her head, mystified. “All in English,” she said. “If you can’t make sense of it, I don’t know how I can.” She returned to the bookshelves, and wandered along them, scanning myriad titles. “What was his profession?”

“He worked at London University. An expert in tropical medical genetics.”

She raised her head and let her eyes wander along a colourful array of books on the subject. “Hmmm. Yes. He wasn’t English, though, was he?”

Enzo raised his eyebrows in surprise. “How do you know that?”

She turned and ran her fingertips along a line of books on a middle shelf. “What native English speaker would have so many books on English grammar and vocabulary? Unless he taught it, of course.”

Enzo smiled. “Can you tell me what nationality he was?”

“Polish, I’d say.”

This time he raised his eyebrows in astonishment. “How do you know that?”

She pointed to another line of books on an upper shelf. “It seems his interest in history extended to only two countries. England and Poland. One his adopted home, the other the land of his birth. That would be my guess anyway.”

“Congratulations, Mademoiselle Roux, you’ve just won a set of steak knives and a holiday for two in sunny Warsaw.”

Which made her smile. But it was a fleeting smile, lost as her focus returned to the room. She crossed to Killian’s work bench, touching nothing, but staring at it for a long time. Then she opened the filing cabinet and let her eyes wander along the rows of tabs on the suspension files. A, B, C… She slid the top drawer shut and opened the one below it, fingering the files, as if something might communicate itself by touch. Then she crossed to his desk, and went through the drawers one by one, touching nothing this time. Just looking. After which she stood for a long time, arms folded, her scarf hanging down almost to her knees, eyes drifting around the room, taking in the pictures and display cases so neatly lined up on the opposite wall, one above the other.